On May 20th, when I was ten years old, I had tonsillitis.
It was probably due to sheer excitement and nervousness over the fact that my mother and father were getting married.
On the way to the wedding at Tibirke Church, my mother and grandfather stopped at the avenue leading up to the Sandflugtsmonumentet (The Sand Drift Monument).
They were early, so there was time for a bit of tobacco.
The portal-like ‘Sandflugtsmonumentet’ (The Sand Drift Monument) stands atop a small hill in Tibirke, a miniature Amon Sûl.
Designed by Elias David Häusser and Didrick Gercken in 1738, it documents the successful efforts to combat sand drift that plagued the region from the 1500s to the 1700s.
Work to combat the drift began in 1724. Locals and soldiers from Copenhagen worked together to dig trenches, build fences, and plant willow, cherry, oak, and beech trees along with hardy grasses like marram to stabilise the dunes.
This hard work led to what would become Tisvilde Hegn, a massive protected forest. Today Tisvilde Hegn stretches along a roughly 7 kilometre coastal strip and covers around 1,300 hectares.
From a distance, or to a child that hasn’t learned to read, the inscriptions look like runes: three languages, Danish, Latin, and German, testify to the period’s polyglossia. The Latin face has all but vanished under moss and can no longer be read; the Danish and German faces survive.
The inscriptions
Each surviving face carries two texts: a short one naming the men who did the work, and a longer one telling the story of the sand. They are folded below. Open a section to read the original lettering, a modern rendering and an English translation.
Side 1 – Danish: Gram and Røhl
Original inscription
OM. NOGEN. SPØRGE. VIL. OG. HAFVER
LYST. AT. VIDE.
PAA. HVEM. I. DENNE. SAG. MONARCHEN
KUNDE. LIDE.
DA. HAFVER. AMTMAND. GRAM. EI
HVILET. MED. SIT. ØYE.
OG. RØHL. SOM. VEL. FORTIENT. ER
LØNNET. FOR. SIN. MØYE.
Modern Danish
Hvis nogen vil spørge og har lyst til at vide, hvem monarken kunne stole på i denne sag, så har amtmand Gram ikke hvilet sit øje, og Røhl, som vel fortjent er, er blevet lønnet for sin møje.
English
If anyone wants to ask and would like to know whom the monarch could rely on in this matter, then Amtmand Gram has never let his eye rest, and Røhl, as is well deserved, has been rewarded for his toil.
“Amtmand” was a royal official in charge of a county (amt), roughly a county governor or prefect. “Not rested his eye” means he never let his vigilance slip, keeping constant watch over the work. The original Danish text rhymes in pairs (vide/lide, øye/møye).
Side 1 – Danish: The sand drift
Original inscription
HER. SAAE. DET. ILDE. UD. FOR. NOGLE
TIDER. SIDEN.
MED. SAND. VAR. ALTING. SKIULT. OG
FAREN. VAR. EI. LIDEN.
SANDBIERGE. VOXTE. OP. FLØY. FREM
NAAR. VINDEN. KOM.
OG. DREF. SAA. MANGEN. EEN. FRA. HUUS
OG. EIENDOM.
HVORFOR. KONG. FREDERICH. TIL
LANDETS. GAVN. OG. BESTE.
LOD. GRIBE. VERKET. AN. MED. VOGNE.
FOLK. OG. HESTE.
OG. LOD. SAA. VIDT. MAN. KOM. DEN. LØSE
GRUND. BESAAE.
AT. DER. HVOR. INTET. VAR. OPVOXER
GRÆS. OG. STRAAE.
VOR. SIETTE. CHRISTIAN. VOR
HERLIGHED. I. NORDEN.
VED. HAM. DET. HELE. VERK. TIL. ENDE
BRAGT. ER. VORDEN.
O. AT. HANS. ÆT. OG. SÆD. SAA. LÆNGE
BLIFVE. MAAE.
SOM. MAND. KAND. STØF. OG. SAND
OMKRING. VED. HAFVET. FAAE.
Modern Danish
Her så det slemt ud for nogle år siden. Alt var dækket af sand, og faren var ikke lille. Sandbjerge voksede op og fløj frem, når vinden kom, og drev mangen en fra hus og ejendom. Derfor lod kong Frederik, til landets gavn og bedste, gribe værket an med vogne, folk og heste, og lod den løse grund tilså, så langt man nåede, så der nu vokser græs og strå, hvor der før intet var. Vor sjette Christian, vor herlighed i Norden – ved ham er hele værket blevet bragt til ende. Gid hans slægt og efterkommere må bestå lige så længe, som man kan finde støv og sand rundt omkring ved havet.
English
Not long ago, things looked grim here. Everything was buried under sand, and the danger was far from small. Mountains of sand rose up and swept forward whenever the wind came, driving many a person from house and home. That is why King Frederik, for the good and benefit of the country, had the work taken in hand with wagons, men and horses, and had the loose ground sown as far as one could reach, so that grass and straw now grow where nothing grew before. Our Christian the Sixth, our glory in the North – through him the whole work has been brought to completion. May his line and offspring endure as long as dust and sand can be found around the shores of the sea.
Side 2 – German: Gram and Røhl
Original inscription
ES. DAEMPFT. DEN. FLIEGE-SAND.
AUF. KOENIG. FRIDERICHS. UND. CHRISTIANS
GEHEISS.
DES. AMPTMANNS. FRIDERICH. VON. GRAMS
GETREUER. FLEISS.
UND. ROEHLS. GEUBTE. HAND.
1738.
Modern German
Es dämpft den Fliegesand auf König Friedrichs und Christians Geheiß des Amtmanns Friedrich von Grams getreuer Fleiß und Röhls geübte Hand. 1738.
Modern Danish
Flyvesandet dæmpes på kong Frederiks og Christians befaling af amtmand Frederik von Grams trofaste flid og Røhls øvede hånd. 1738.
English
The drifting sand is tamed, at the command of Kings Frederik and Christian, by the faithful diligence of Amtmand Frederik von Gram and the practised hand of Røhl. 1738.
Side 2 – German: The sand drift
Original inscription
SCHAU. LESER.
DIESES. GRUNE. LAND.
SO. DU. BIS. AN. DIE. SEE. SIEHST. LIEGEN.
WAR. NEULICH. NOCH. EIN. MEER
VON. SAND.
SO. WO. DER. WIND. SICH. HINGEWANDT.
SANDWELLEN. LIES. WIE. BERGE. FLIEGEN.
DIE. UBERSCHWEMMTEN. FELD. UND. WALD.
STROHM. AECKER. WIESEN. DOERFFER. HUTTEN
SAH. MAN. IM. SANDE. GANTZ. VERSCHUTTEN.
DAS. UBERSTROHMTE. FELD. DROHT. ALSOBALD
DEM. NECHSTANLIEGENDEN. MIT. GLEICHER
SANDS-GEWALT.
BIS. KOENIG. FRIDERICH. DER. VIERTE
ZU. ERST. DER. NOHT. HALF. AB.
DEM. SANDE. FESTE. GRAENTZEN. GAB
UND. HIN. UND. WIEDER. IHN. MIT. GRUNER. KLEIDUNG
ZIERTE.
WORAUF. SEIN. GROSSER. SOHN. DER. SECHSTE
CHRISTIAN.
DAS. FEHLENDE. HINZUGETHAN.
BIS. ER. DAS. SCHOENE. WERCK. VOLLFUHRTE
DAS. ITZT. DER. SAND. DER. SEELAND. WOLT
VERHEEREN.
ALS. EIN. FRUCHTBAHRES. FELD. MUSZ. VIELE
THIERE. NEHREN.
VEREHRE. SO. DER. LANDES-VAETER
WEISEN. RAHT.
DEN. GOTTES. MACHT. GESEGNET. HAT.
UND. WUNSCHE. DAS. IHR. STAM. AUF. ERDEN
MAG. WIE. DER. SAND. AM. MEER. UND. UNVERGAENGLICH
WERDEN. &c.
Modern German
Schau, Leser, dieses grüne Land, so du bis an die See siehst liegen, war neulich noch ein Meer von Sand. So, wo der Wind sich hingewandt, Sandwellen ließ wie Berge fliegen, die überschwemmten Feld und Wald. Strom, Äcker, Wiesen, Dörfer, Hütten sah man im Sande ganz verschütten. Das überströmte Feld droht alsobald dem nächstanliegenden mit gleicher Sandsgewalt. Bis König Friedrich der Vierte zuerst der Not half ab, dem Sande feste Grenzen gab und hin und wieder ihn mit grüner Kleidung zierte. Worauf sein großer Sohn, der sechste Christian, das Fehlende hinzugetan, bis er das schöne Werk vollführte, dass jetzt der Sand, der Seeland wollt’ verheeren, als ein fruchtbares Feld muss viele Tiere nähren. Verehre so der Landesväter weisen Rat, den Gottes Macht gesegnet hat, und wünsche, dass ihr Stamm auf Erden mag wie der Sand am Meer und unvergänglich werden.
Modern Danish
Se, læser: dette grønne land, som du ser strække sig helt ud til havet, var for nylig endnu et hav af sand. Hvor vinden end vendte sig hen, lod den sandbølger flyve som bjerge, der oversvømmede mark og skov. Vandløb, agre, enge, landsbyer og hytter så man blive helt begravet i sandet. Den oversvømmede mark truede straks nabojorden med samme sandets vold. Indtil kong Frederik den Fjerde som den første afhjalp nøden, gav sandet faste grænser og hist og her prydede det med grøn klædning. Derpå føjede hans store søn, Christian den Sjette, det manglende til, indtil han fuldførte det smukke værk, så det sand, der ville hærge Sjælland, nu som en frugtbar mark må ernære mange dyr. Ær derfor landsfædrenes vise råd, som Guds magt har velsignet, og ønsk, at deres slægt på jorden må blive som sandet ved havet og uforgængelig.
English
Behold, reader: this green land, which you see stretching all the way to the sea, was until recently a sea of sand. Wherever the wind turned, it sent waves of sand flying like mountains, which swallowed field and forest. Streams, fields, meadows, villages and cottages were seen buried entirely in the sand. Each field once overrun at once threatened the next with the same violence of sand. Until King Frederik the Fourth was the first to relieve the distress, gave the sand firm boundaries and here and there adorned it with a green covering. Whereupon his great son, Christian the Sixth, added what was still lacking, until he completed the fine work, so that the sand which would have ravaged Zealand must now, as fertile ground, feed many animals. Honour, then, the wise counsel of the fathers of the land, which God’s power has blessed, and wish that their line on earth may become like the sand by the sea, and everlasting.
EIN. MEER. VON. SAND. – reading the monument as sound
EIN. MEER. VON. SAND. (snd-drft, September 2026) is an MS-DOS program that reads and rewrites the monument in a semi-obsolete medium. It reads the stone letter by letter, as sound: the Danish and German inscriptions above sound side by side with an English translation, and every letter once read falls into a sea at the foot of the screen.
The executable, SAND.EXE, is written in Turbo Pascal, compiled with Free Pascal for DOS, and targets a 386 with VGA graphics and a Sound Blaster 16. It ships with its soundtrack, a batch file and a DOSBox configuration – everything it needs and nothing more. The score and the raw audio (8-bit, 22,050 Hz, stereo) were generated separately, in APL; the sound lives beside the executable in its own file, SAND.SND, and is streamed from disk as the program runs.
The work stacks three strata of obsolescence: an eighteenth-century inscription in three languages, a hardware target from the early 1990s, and a programming language most people last touched around the same time.
Monument and monitor share a Latin root, monere, “to remind”.
Also see: Flora Excursoria Hafniensis
Letters into partials
Since the Latin face has vanished under moss, the program reads the two surviving faces and sets an English translation beside them as a third column: 582 Danish letters, 834 German, and 1,557 English.
The engine parses all three texts one letter at a time. Each letter becomes a partial of A2 (110 Hz), selected by its position in the alphabet taken modulo a value that drifts, over the piece’s 8 minutes 54 seconds, from 12 to 17. A letter therefore does not keep its pitch: the bond between what is seen and what is heard loosens as the piece unfolds.
Read across, the letters tell of Amtmand Frederik von Gram, of Røhl and the taming of the sand; read down, each is exchanged for a frequency. Words the three texts hold in common – “sand”, “wind”, “sea”, “1738”, “Gram”, “Røhl”, “Frederik”, “Christian” – light up in all three columns at once, a reminder of how closely Danish, German and English still lie to one another underneath.
SAND.ANS
The look of the piece belongs to the bulletin-board era of the early and mid-1990s, when the screen was a fixed grid of characters and anything resembling a picture had to be assembled from the extended ASCII set and ANSI colour codes. That world went quickly: between late 1994 and 1996, cheap dial-up and graphical browsers arrived, and within a year or so thousands of boards had gone dark.
Where it was released
EIN. MEER. VON. SAND. was released as snd-drft by chrntps on pouet.net, the demoscene’s register since 2000: tens of thousands of productions reaching back to the 1980s – demos, intros, music disks, ANSI packs – each with a download link, a screenshot, a platform tag and a comment thread.
The archive was then uploaded to scene.org and listed on demozoo.org. On 3 October an audio-only adaptation followed on SoundCloud, free to stream and download.
Running it in 2026
All you need is DOSBox; details in the questions below. DOSBOX.CONF configures a Sound Blaster 16 (A220 I7 D1 H5) and the fastest CPU setting.
The picture follows the sound card, so the timing holds even when the frame rate drops: around 14 frames a second when the sea is full, up to 70 when it is sparse.
How does a letter become a sound?
Everything sounds over a single fixed tone, A2 at 110 Hz. Each letter becomes a harmonic of that tone, chosen by its place in the alphabet and reduced modulo a number; the Danish letters Æ, Ø and Å extend the alphabet as 27, 28 and 29. Over the piece the modulus drifts from 12 to 17, so a letter’s tone shifts as the rule it is read under shifts.
- Vowels swell and hold; consonants strike.
- A letter that recurs often in its line sounds louder.
- Every letter, once sounded, leaves a permanent trace in the drone at the tuning it had in that moment.
- Words the languages share (sand, sea, wind, the kings’ names, 1738) ring as bells.
- The mossed-over Latin face is heard as letters without notes. Twice, everything stops.
How do I run the demo?
It needs a 386 or better with VGA and a Sound Blaster 16 – or simply DOSBox (0.74-3 from dosbox.com, DOSBox-X or DOSBox Staging) on Windows, macOS or Linux. Unzip sand.zip into a folder such as C:\SAND, then double-click RUN.BAT, or start DOSBox and type:
mount c c:\sand
c:
sandESC quits. sand 300 starts five minutes in. If DOSBox cannot find a Sound Blaster 16, type set blaster=A220 I7 D1 H5 T6 first.
What is in the download?
- SAND.EXE: the demo, 8:54 (16-bit real mode, large memory model, needs a 386+).
- SAND.SND: the soundtrack, kept separate as demos once did (raw unsigned 8-bit stereo, 22,050 Hz, 23.6 MB).
- DOSBOX.CONF and RUN.BAT: ready-made settings and a launcher for Windows.
- FILE_ID.DIZ and SAND.NFO: description, instructions and credits.
- SAND.ANS: the monument as ANSI art.
- SRC\: the full source – SAND.PAS (the rule, the sea, the columns), SCOREDAT.PAS (the score), FONT8.PAS (a 5×8 bitmap font, ISO 8859-1, for Æ, Ø, Å), VGA.PAS (mode 13h, 64 greys, back buffer), SND.PAS (Sound Blaster 16, auto-init DMA streaming), ENDSCR.PAS (the end screen: the monument in text mode), and TEXTS.APL, SCORE.APL and SYNTH.APL (the texts, the score and the sound).
Which programming languages does it use?
- APL (GNU APL): the letter rule, the score and every sound.
- Pascal, written for Turbo Pascal 7 and compiled with Free Pascal for 16-bit DOS. (I was outbid on eBay for a set of original Turbo Pascal 7.0 disks – still licence-restricted, though released in 1992. If you have a copy to sell, I’d like to hear from you. The same goes for an original OS/2 Warp.)
- VGA mode 13h (320×200, 64 greys), the Sound Blaster 16 with DMA streaming, and ANSI art in the DOS character set.
- Tested in DOSBox.
Are there other versions?
- Video, in progress: an MP4 rendition for anyone without DOSBox or a vintage PC.
- ANSI mock-ups: the monument in high resolution, and the monument paired with the circuit board of a Trust 14k4 modem, close kin to the one that ran NetLock once the BBS got its own phone line. These began as still images, made by digital macro-photography through vintage cameras and lenses; not yet released.
Where can I find it?
- Scene.org: scene.org/get/demos/artists/bergholt/sand.zip
- Pouët: snd-drft by chrntps
- Demozoo: snd-drft by chrntps
Also see:
Triptychs for Solar Eclipses
The Time Is Out of Joint
William Gibson, William Wordsworth, William Shakespeare
